MARK WARREN: Hello to you out there in California, John. I assume you're there incognito, as I don't believe they actually allow your kind these days, do they? Before I respond to your last offering, I was just looking back over this that you wrote the day before that, referring to the president, after you had just allowed that he was actually a decent man: "However, Mark, he is not a deity, so can we move on?"

John, versions of this deity/magic negro/healer of the sick, savior of earth have been such durable strawmen on your side, born of deep feelings of inadequacy and Lord knows what else, that it almost makes me feel bad that the best you guys can do as the faces of your doomsday cult are Allen West and Louie Gohmert, who aren't even sentient beings much less deities. I know that Obama's not a deity. And besides, you know well that my god is Ryan Seacrest. So lay off.

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Now as to your last dispatch, first to your point on Obama not trying hard enough to reach accommodation with the vandals on your side, and your repeated citation of Reagan and Clinton as the models for perseverance in the face of partisan intransigence. To that, John, I will first say that this time simply cannot be compared to those other times, in that the partisan intransigence of the 80s and 90s is still largely recognizable as conventional politics. No one ever accused Reagan or Clinton of being the center of a vast alien conspiracy to destroy America, which is what a great many members of your party today believe about Obama. And further, because they don't know anything about anything, a great many members of your party now have come to believe that any expenditure of the public coin is socialism, and any taxation is confiscatory. Add to that an exaltation of crank science and crank history, and we now find that yours is the party of people who don't know how this country was actually built, or by whom. So there's that. One must ask: How in the hell is one supposed to "try harder" in the face of such bullshit?

On the other hand, you might be surprised that I concede a major point to you: Obama hasn't tried hard enough. And by that I don't mean to say that he knocks off everyday at 4:30 like W. No, what I mean is that three-quarters of a president's job is to communicate. And for as world-historic good at political communication as Barack Obama is, he has actually been a very poor communicator while in office. Or let's say that he has been an irregular communicator. Health care didn't have to be the near-death experience that it became. But it was the Obama's dilatory nature during that fight that almost cost him his most remarkable achievement. During that time, he would come out of the White House, give a brilliant speech, then disappear again for months, apparently assured that the American people would know well that he was going about the hard work of doing good, but all the while the Republicans and their idiot accomplices on Fox News were eating his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti. In that same vein, the loss of Ted Kennedy's senate seat can be owed to the very same presidential diffidence. Had Obama been working on the public as assiduously as were his enemies, the Democrats would have kept that seat, and the Affordable Care Act wouldn't have required Harry Reid's eleventh-hour parliamentary hocus-pocus to pass, and the law would now both be better understood and more popular than it is.

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Our president has the temperament of a novelist, and seems to want to be alone much of the time. This is an interesting predisposition for such a job, making him a deeper thinker certainly, but it can also be enraging, actually. He is most certainly not Bill Clinton, who feeds on contact with the people, and is replenished by it. For as good as Obama is at this politics stuff, he is by contrast depleted by its rigors. Remember after Clinton's astonishing speech at the DNC when Obama joked about appointing Clinton to be the "secretary of explaining stuff"? Funny, right? Yeah, well, Mr. President, that's supposed to be your damn job. And I will never stop being mystified by the fact that Obama continued for years to strain for comity with the nutcases in your party, seemingly failing to recognize that it wasn't comity they were looking for at all, but rather they only wanted his head on a stick. So if that's what you mean by going over the heads of the congress and the parties, and making the case directly to the American people, then by God I agree with you.

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And, not to make a habit of that, but on the subject of "vote fraud," I can only say that... I found what you wrote the other day to be deeply moving, actually. Jesus Christ, man, when it comes to your party's hideous effort to disenfranchise voters, you have absolutely nailed it, John, and more passionately and persuasively than anything else I've read. On this issue at least, I'd follow you anywhere.

Which leads me to this critical question: After a number of days discussing issues with you, and of witnessing your candor and growing apostasy, are you the RINO? Or is the rest of your misbegotten party the RINOs? Do you represent a quiet dignified majority of the remnant of the party of George H.W. Bush, or are you a man without a party?

JOHN WEAVER: Hi, Mark. Phew! I was able to slip in to Los Angeles — even into Hollywood — meet with my brothers and sisters under the cover of darkness, and scurry to the Burbank airport and make it back to Texas unharmed. Mission accomplished. It was a pretty daring raid, for sure, but I was quietly aided by Los Angelinos who, get this, are actually fed up with one-party rule which has left their local and state governments practically bankrupt, basic services threatened or eliminated, businesses shuttered, and petty and large corruption growing. Heck, might be fertile ground for another mission soon.

I'll keep you posted.

Mark, cut the crap with me about "magic negro/healer of the sick, savior of the earth" and lumping me in with fringe loon players. I have never thought that way nor even understand what the hell you're yapping about; and on the latter, well, they embarrass me I'm sure as much as the fine congresswoman from Los Angeles, Maxine Waters, embarrasses you with her theories of the CIA introducing crack into black communities. Why don't we both agree not to go on strolls down the grassy knoll?

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Glad to know we could find some common ground regarding President Obama's performance while in office. The way I read it, eliminating all of your caveats and attacks on the GOP, you agree the president "hasn't tried hard enough." The president hasn't lived up to his potential, he gives up too early, and he refuses on many issues to engage even members of his own party — much less the opposition, loyal or whacky.

This is a tough week for you guys in Manhattan. World leaders and diplomats everywhere, fancy restaurants booked solid, and traffic jammed. Too bad, other than finding time to banter on The View and give his speech before the United Nations, President Obama chose not to participate in UN Week. Chose not to meet with other heads of state. Too risky politically, his advisers said. That's leadership, for sure. The world is in fine form right now, right, Mark? No need to sit down with anyone from North Africa or the Middle East, or Central Asia, where our young people continue to be killed in this crazy war. No reason, given the financial crisis in Europe that impacts here, to meet with any of our allies. And I won't even get into including Israel. Now, he did leave the meetings in the capable hands of Secretary Clinton, so for that we're lucky. By the way, Mark, for all your concern about President George W. Bush's work habits, he did find time in the fall of 2004 — while locked in a tough re-election campaign also — to meet one on one with over 20 heads of state. Surely you don't want a president to shirk more than W.?

Thanks, Mark, regarding the awful attempt by cowardly election thugs to deny voting to some of our citizens. All of us need to be vigilant about this and speak out at any attempt to erode our fundamental rights.

Ahhh, you raise the dreaded RINO word. Is now the time to interject Aaron Sorkin's Will McAvoy and his definition of those who throw around that word so often?

There are millions of people like me that believe in and want to be of a party that wants limited and efficient government, cherishes and defends freedom of all our citizens in "their pursuit of happiness," understands, and acknowledges and seeks a government that also assists those in need. Republicans who can trace their ideological support for freedom from Lincoln through to Reagan are not RINOs. Those who have hijacked portions of the party, scream the loudest from radio booths and hurl epithets in blogs and promote a form of freedom that is anything but — they are the true RINOs. We should have a longer discussion about this as we get nearer November, as I suspect the Republican Party will engage — actually must engage — in a conflict to resolve this split.

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